(Editor’s Note: Today, I am testing a new website feature, a weekly report on streaming ratings. One of the biggest pain points of the coverage of the streaming wars seems to be that no one knows what is doing well, what is doing poorly and, frankly, what customers want. For example, folks saying that here, here or here for just three examples.
As this website enters its fourth calendar year, I’ve been looking for ways to expand my coverage. Solving the ratings problem seems like a pretty good way to do it. I’ll be explaining more in the future, but for now, I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.)
One of the challenges in reporting on ratings is the lag time from when a show premieres to when we get actual data on it. If we rely only on Netflix, for example, we can get results sometimes after the first weekend, but sometimes delayed up to nearly eight weeks. Nielsen is the most reliable and regular reporter on streaming ratings, but they delay ratings by four weeks to double-check their data.
So yes, this is a ratings report for the week of “February 24th”, but it covers mostly the data through January 24th. Confused? Yeah, welcome to the streaming wars.
[Another Editor’s Note: My analysis will be only of the United States to start. We have the best data in the U.S. so far. As data expands, so will my coverage.]
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Television
The biggest winner of January is Bridgerton, which continued its dominance of the Netflix top ratings charts. Notably, new releases such as Cobra Kai, Disenchanted, and Lupin all failed to knock Bridgerton from the top spot in the U.S. This type of performance is really what separates truly “elite” TV series from simply “good” series.
As for competition, Disney+ remains the best competitor to Netflix in streaming. (Since the fall, Disney has had two original series on the list, and the last non-Disney was Prime Video’s The Boys.) And the total viewing hours might actually undersell how popular the Disney shows are. For example, here’s the January release chart by “hours viewed per episode”.
Hours viewed per episode is a temporary metric I’ve been using to gauge how well new series are launching. It isn’t perfect—for example, WandaVision is half as long as some of these other series, so arguably this even undercounts WandaVision viewers—but for now, it works as a proxy for demand per episode. The takeaway continues to be, like The Mandalorian, Disney has high “bang for the buck” when it comes to viewers per series.
[Another Editor Note: Yes, this first edition is Nielsen-heavy. Going forward, I will add additional data sources to my analysis, including top ten ratings, Google Trends, and new metrics/scores for how well content is doing. It will be a process.]
Other Quick Notes on TV
– Library TV series continue to do well on Netflix, but the departure of The Office provided an opening for other series. For example, Jenni Rivera: Mariposa del Barrio made the top ten list, and that’s a licensed show (originally from Telemundo, produced by NBCUniversal) that has been on Netflix since 2017. New Girl also seems to be a regular feature on the acquired TV list.
– New content still drives Netflix viewership, showing that even more than library, customers flock to what’s recently premiered. Henry Danger for kids and L.A.’s Finest are examples of library or second run content doing well in January.
– Lupin is the first French title to make a Nielsen list, but it wouldn’t have made the top ten in either week. Given that Netflix announced it will have an estimated 70 million global viewers in the first four weeks, this is another data point that international titles just don’t perform as well in the U.S. as they do abroad, despite narratives otherwise.
Film
Outside the Wire is Netflix’s latest big action film and it bucked the trend of big declines from the first opening weekend to the second. However, it also launched much smaller than Extraction (18.5 million hours) or The Old Guard (16 million). We’ll see if it can sustain this into a third weekend.
Otherwise, the story is similar to the one I described in my last “visual of the week”, in that the film list is the home for kids content. Frozen 2, Moana and Soul look set to stay well streamed going forward. A fun question will be if We Can Be Heroes drops down like other Netflix titles or acts more like the Disney stalwarts.
Other Quick Notes on Film
– Amazon Prime Video’s Oscar candidate One Night in Miami didn’t have a big opening, but it did have minimal week-over-week decay. The question going forward is whether all Amazon titles act like this (due to a smaller catalogue, hence more promotion on the home page) or if this represents some genuine growth via word of mouth praise.
– Pieces of a Woman on Netflix did experience the likely expected big decay from its opening weekend, dropping off the list after its opening weekend.
– The White Tiger actually got a Netflix datecdote with an estimated 27 million global viewers in the first four weeks. With presumably 1-2 million or so viewers in the U.S.—dividing the two-hour run time with a 70% watch rate—this likely shows that the film under-indexed in U.S. viewing, as most intentional titles do.
Competition
My big question for the streaming wars this year is simple: will this fight be competitive?
Looking at the last year, you’d say it isn’t a fair fight. Netflix is far and away the biggest streamer in America, whether you measure by subscriber or by total usage. That’s why I’ll be tracking a few metrics to determine whether Netflix is pulling away from the pack, or whether the pack is catching up to Netflix.
Here are the top ten pieces of content in film or TV series by streamer going back through the last six weeks:
The good news if you’re not Netflix? Well, when the traditional studios went all in, they took quite a bit of market share from Netflix. Christmas was the Soul/Wonder Woman 1984 deluge, and frankly, it got a lot of eyeballs to Disney+ and HBO Max.
The good news if you are Netflix? As soon as the studios stopped releasing their big guns, Netflix went back to owning the entire list. For example, in the past, a show like WandaVision, with only 3 episodes generating 6.3 million hours watched, would have dropped off our radar.
The goal for the Amazons and Disneys of the world is to move up from owning the “film” portion of this list to owning more spots on the top ten and fifteen. We’ll see if they can do it.
